Helen's Garden Renovation Project

I am pleased to find that I appear to have made a good decision in planting my pale pink very early rhododendron.

Pale pink rhododendron, sheltered by a brick wall

It is sheltered from the east wind by the pond, and I think this is the reason why most of the flowers are still pink and not brown, despite the late frosts we have had.

Last year I planted an offshoot of this rhododendron in a more exposed place in our communal planting areas, and this one has gone much browner.

Rhododendron with frost damage

With this rhododendron, there always is a gamble. It’s lovely to have pretty pink flowers out so early in the year, but they only work if the frosts stay away. But I think I did the right thing in choosing the place where I planted it in my garden.

Also in our communal areas, we have a good sized flock of hellebores, which have been breeding like crazy in the cold winters. Here is a seedling which I dug up, flowering for the first time.

Hellebore seedling

People tell me that hellebore seedlings usually come out mud-coloured, but I think this one is pretty enough. This year I have dug up some more seedlings underneath the purplest of the hellebores, and in two years’ time I will see whether I have any purple ones.

There is no more progress to report because I am still waiting for J Parkers to send me my plants. I ordered them on 29 February, and they are supposed to be delivered within 28 days, so I hope I won’t have long to wait.

The hosepipe ban will start on 5 April. I have already started watering my pots and the newly-planted evergreens because it has been quite warm and dry recently. I have managed to get rid of a few more pots, but it’s going to be a lot of work to keep everything alive. Just for once, I am hoping for a wet summer.

Today I decided it was time to re-route the road to nowhere, leading from between my apple trees to the back hedge.

The Path to Nowhere

I thought a path between the apple trees would be useful for maintenance and would provide a route to the greenhouse and the vegetable bed behind it. However, I soon realised that it looked wrong because it appeared to just disappear off into the back hedge. Also, the area between the apple trees will get some sun, and I can’t waste any sunny bits of my garden. So I rerouted the path to run parallel to the edge of the lawn, and this will provide a dry route to the left hand corner of the garden, as well as allowing access to the apple trees and other plants in that area.

The path re-routed to run behind the apple trees.

I have ordered a little bundle of plants from J Parkers, but they say it can take 28 days for delivery, and I only ordered them 12 days ago. The plants were competitively priced. I am not worried if they turn out to be small, because small plants need less water. It is certain that we will have a hosepipe ban by the end of April, and it could be sooner. I need to get rid of some more plants in pots, either by composting them, planting them, or giving them away.

After some early morning fog, today has developed into a warm sunny day. But where are this year’s brimstone butterflies? I haven’t seen any yet.

Having decided on Monday that the buddleia was in the wrong place, I thought I had better move it now rather than later. Ebullient Eagle Radio was forecasting a high of 16C, while Classic FM was more subdued, but still predicting a pleasant 15C. Spring will not be long away now. I decided that the best position was in front of the hedge and behind the apple trees. Although the apple trees will block the light some of the day, the buddleia does have the advantage of being tall, and it’s certainly less hemmed in than it was before. I thought that I might not be able to plant it where I wanted to because of the soakaway, but I dug deep and did not come across the soakaway, so it does not seem to extend that far. Naturally, digging up a newly-planted shrub was not a difficult job.

Buddleia in its new position

I still have to think about what to do about the path to nowhere. It looks odd to have the path between the two apple trees but not have anything particular at the end of it. I may take away one or two of the paving stones.

Once the buddleia had been relocated, I had another think about the left-hand border. The path of stepping stones does not run exactly parallel to the fence because I need it to diverge off to the left to avoid the pointy corner of the raised pond. The other consideration is that I need to make sure I do not block access to the fence posts because the posts rot and need to be replaced every few years, and my neighbours cannot do this work from their side of the garden because there is a Leylandii hedge in the way. The bay tree is a good choice to put where the buddleia was because it provides a nice green backdrop for the magnolia when viewed from the right, and it can be pruned to any size. I worked out that I could put three plants between the bay tree and the rhododendron, and I marked their positions with potted plants.

Left hand border with stepping stones and potted plants in position

The problem is still quite simple: how do I reconcile my list of plants I want with the list of the plants that the garden can accommodate?

We had a sharp frost last night (down to below -3C) but it is warming up fast, and we could be in for some spring-like weather by the end of the week.

So I hard-pruned some of my shrubs. I pruned the wisteria back to hardly any buds, like it says on the RHS website. I pruned my rose Mischief, which is a hybrid tea and therefore wants pruning very ruthlessly, apparently. I don’t think I have ever pruned it before, apart from taking off dead bits, so this is a new experience for it. I pruned my three Cornus, but not as hard as I did last year because I thought it might be a bit much for them. I also pruned my spiraea. I had already trimmed it a bit, but the book said that summer-flowering spiraea want to be hacked back to very short stems, so I did that. Then I looked at the bay tree and decided that was a project for another day.

Yesterday I did some armchair gardening. I want a yellow variegated male holly to sit next to my euonymus europaeus Red Cascade and it’s not easy to get male hollies with yellow colouring on their leaves. I want a male one to improve the pollination of my female JC Van der Tol (which is hermaphrodite, but would probably enjoy some male company) and for any other female hollies I may decide to have. Also I think that it will be better as a backdrop and a contrast if it doesn’t have any berries.

So I looked on the RHS Plant Finder, and among other sites, I found this one: Chris Pattison Nursery. They have a few hollies to choose from, and in the description they helpfully say whether it is male or female, thus cutting down the amount of research I have to do to check. But that’s not all. They also have a stunning range of Liquidambars. Now I have wanted a Liquidambar ever since I saw one in Wisley about fifteen years ago, but Yvonne, my garden designer, said I couldn’t have one because it was too large. But there are varieties that only reach 2-3 m high! And if you prune them, you can even keep big varieties small and you still get the incredible colour. See Top 20 or so shrubs for a picture of a 20-year-old Liquidambar that has glorious colour and is still only relatively little.

So… I CAN HAVE A LIQUIDAMBAR! OK, so it may have to go in the front garden rather than the back, and unless I order it in the dormant season, I may have to go to Gloucestershire for it, but I can still have one. Yay!

I have been giving considerable thought to my planting arrangements and still can’t quite work out what to do. I have, however, come to the unfortunate conclusion that I have planted the buddleia in the wrong place. Hemmed in by a giant conifer, the magnolia and the fence, it will not get enough sunlight and it needs to go in a more open position. Instead, I need to plant an evergreen that doesn’t mind a bit of shade, and it’ll probably be Bay Tree Number 2 (the one my parents gave me, which is sitting in a pot). Where I will put the buddleia is an unsolved mystery but it definitely needs to move.

We had another fall of snow last night. Again, it wasn’t much – only about 5 cm. Already the snow is melting rapidly in the sunshine.

There is a great contrast between my two ponds in terms of temperature. The raised pond is covered with the full dose of snow and underneath there is thick ice. The shallow pond has no snow on it, and is covered only with a very thin, weak layer of ice through which I can easily push a finger.

Raised pond covered in snow; shallow pond covered in thin ice

I had expected the raised pond to be more prone to getting frozen than the shallow pond, but even so the contrast surprises me. I wonder if the wall of the raised pond is giving some shelter to the shallow pond, thus preventing it from getting too cold. If so, it is good news for the wildlife. If I want to keep fish in the raised pond, I will need to be careful about remembering to break the ice for them. I am hoping that in time the pieris (see snow-covered plant behind the far corner of the raised pond) will grow big enough to give some shelter to one corner, thus impeding the ice formation in that corner.

According to my friend John, this is all my fault for saying in my last entry that we hadn’t had any snow yet.

The first snowfall for the new ponds

Despite the fact that I am re-reading my complete Perry Mason collection during the snug winter evenings, I cannot think of a defence.

The snow fell on Saturday evening, and therefore some of it has now sublimed off into the atmosphere. I think the depth was 5 cm at most, so this is a minor event in comparison with what we have had in the last two winters. However, even before the snow, the temperature has been too low to do any gardening, sinking to -7.3C on Saturday morning. I suppose I could have picked up some more fallen leaves for about ten minutes before my fingers froze solid, or I could have pruned the bay tree, but I decided not to. My wrist is now nearly recovered, but I may still not be able to lift any pots if they are stuck to the ground with ice.

With the Met Office forecasting a month of cold weather and probably some more snow, this month is going to be a month of armchair gardening, as I draw up my shortlist of shrubs and work out where to buy them from. There is a chance that I may be able to partly solve the problem of wanting more shrubs than will fit into the space by putting some of them in pots. I would have to make sure that I only chose very hardy shrubs, because shrubs in pots are much more vulnerable to cold than shrubs in the open ground, but I will have plenty of patio space once I have planted everything that is meant to go into the permanent planting.

The other gardening-related thing I have in mind is to spend a month tweeting about gardening on Twitter and see if I can get the RHS to follow me. The RHS follows all sorts of people, so I think I could be in with a chance.

A few days ago the Met Office stopped dithering between “freezing cold” and “warm but windy”, and decided to give us the freezing cold. Fortunately we haven’t had any snow yet here in Hampshire, and the forecast is for dry weather for the next few days.

Cold and dry weather is excellent for heaving paving stones and rocks about, but I have hurt my left wrist when manhandling the buddleia last week. This means I have difficulty lifting with the palm upwards. I still managed to lift some paving slabs by holding them diagonally against my body, and I positioned the last three slabs of my ten at the left hand side of the garden, but didn’t line them up accurately or get them level. I also did some sawing up of the Leylandi branches that I cut off last year.

I am still dithering about what I need to plant next, but this is not a problem because it would be better to wait for at least a month and thus give the plants a chance to start their new lives under warmer and lighter conditions. The main problem I have is visualising what the effect of the deciduous shrubs will be on the amount of light reaching the spaces around them. The other problem is that there are too many plants I want for the space available.

I thought that now would be a good time to clear away the leaves and weeds from under the trees by the back fence and make it neat and tidy, because I am going to get the fence replaced with a concrete one that will never fall down. I also thought that if I spent too long clearing up leaves or pulling up bittercress, I would get too cold. However, although the thermometer claimed it was below 2 degrees, I felt almost warm in the bright sunshine, scrabbling about for leaves and beech nut cases in a garden that is not quite sure whether it is winter or spring.

I have now moved the hibiscus and planted the buddleia near where the hibiscus used to be. This completes my deciduous shrub planting, and now I am at a point where I need to think what to do next.

Left to right: Buddleia 'Black Knight', Magnolia, Hibiscus syriacus

I now think that I have not enough evergreen shrubs at the end of the lawn, so I need to put some in there. Also I need two more large shrubs to plant down the left hand border, by the fence. I have been noting down shrubs which I like and would like to put in the garden, but I cannot have them all, and also I would like to work out an arrangement which looks good as a whole. So I bought “The complete planting design course” by Hilary Thomas and Steven Wooster so I can learn about designing with plants. Or, even if I don’t learn anything, I can enjoy looking at the pictures when it is too dark/cold/rainy/windy to do any gardening.

Plant design is something I have never thought about before properly and it is very interesting but very obvious when you think about it. You have to consider plant form, like whether the plant sits in a fat complacent mound, or whether it sends out nervous pointy shoots straight up in the air. You also have to look at its texture – does it have lots of tiny little leaves, or great big ones? If you want to make your garden look longer, you should plant tiny-leaved plants, particularly at the back. Naturally you have to consider colour. And then you have to think of the function of the plants – are they there to provide structure or a focal point? Are they use or ornament (or both)? And so on.

I was hoping for a year without much gardening expense, but in the recent winds my back fence has taken a battering and two of the posts are loose. I drilled holes in the loose posts so I could attach wires to give them a bit of support, and the posts were very soft, so I think the fence is at the end of its life after sixteen years. I will get the whole thing replaced as soon as the fencing contractors have finished mending all the other fences that have blown down in the winds.

And finally, I have decided on my gardening New Year’s Resolution. Last year my NYR was to go to Wisley three times, which I did manage. This year my NYR is to water my compost heaps. I am sure that the reason that I am not getting any compost is that the mixture is too dry. The compost bins have lids, so little or no rain gets in. I will also water my leaf mould, but this is not as important because it is kept in open bags.

I haven’t made any progress for a while because it keeps either being windy or being about to get windy. Today it was slightly windy, but I decided that I was fed up with not planting the magnolia and today I wanted to plant it. There is only one place in the garden where there might possibly be enough room for it, and so I put it there.

The magnolia and me

I really struggled to get the magnolia out of its pot. I used gravity by resting the pot on top of a pile of compost bags and pointing the plant at the ground; I used a trowel to dig around the inside of the pot; I even used a hammer and chisel to get a bit deeper than a trowel could go. I thought I would have to saw through the pot, which I didn’t want to do because it is a nice pot. Eventually, after losing quite a lot of soil from its roots and more than a few flower buds, the plant came out.

I have grave doubts about whether it is a good idea to plant a magnolia in such a restricted space, but I think it will be OK there for another five years at least. And although magnolias don’t like being pruned, it doesn’t seem to kill them. So I have made my decision, and we will see how the arrangement develops.

The raised pond is getting fuller, and it won’t be long before the water level reaches the overflow pipe. The water will drain onto a patch of earth behind the pond. My plan was to plant the pieris there, since it likes damp conditions and it is evergreen, so will still be using some water in the winter.

I dug a deep hole – nearly two feet deep at its deepest – and tipped into it my vast stone collection, amassed while digging the garden over a number of years. This made a mini soakaway to help with the drainage.

Hole with layer of stones

Then I filled it up to a depth of 12 inches with earth and compost and stuck the pieris in it, then filled the hole up to the top. I planted the pieris about an inch below the level of the edging blocks because I want a slight dip in this area, so the water run-off from the pond does not go all over the place.

This is what the pieris looks like from the patio.

Pieris planted at the corner of the pond

At the moment it does not quite prevent the very pointy corner of the pond from having an accidental encounter with my leg, but when it grows bigger, it will.

This is the view of the pieris from the side of the pond. You can see (I hope) that the water level is now very close to the top.

I have put bits of paving slab around the pieris to deter weeds and cats, but I really need some ground cover plants that like damp shade to go there. Fortunately my RHS “Plants for Places” book has some attractive suggestions.